14 Pre-Installation Checklist #

Ensure that the following BIOS and IPMI settings are applied to each bare-metal server:

☐	Item
	Choose either UEFI or Legacy BIOS in the BIOS settings
	Verify the Date and Time settings in the BIOS. Note SUSE OpenStack Cloud installs and runs with UTC, not local time.
	Ensure that Wake-on-LAN is disabled in the BIOS
	Ensure that the NIC port to be used for PXE installation has PXE enabled in the BIOS
	Ensure that all other NIC ports have PXE disabled in the BIOS
	Ensure all hardware in the server not directly used by SUSE OpenStack Cloud is disabled

Before installing SUSE OpenStack Cloud, the following networks must be provisioned and tested. The networks are not installed or managed by the Cloud. You must install and manage the networks as documented in Chapter 9, Example Configurations.

Note that if you want a pluggable IPAM driver, it must be specified at install time. Only with a clean install of SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 can you specify a different IPAM driver. If upgrading, you must use the default driver. More information can be found in Section 10.4.7, “Using IPAM Drivers in the Networking Service”.

Use these checklists to confirm and record your network configuration information.

Router

The IP router used with SUSE OpenStack Cloud must support the updated of its ARP table through gratuitous ARP packets.

PXE Installation Network

When provisioning the IP range, allocate sufficient IP addresses to cover both the current number of servers and any planned expansion. Use the following table to help calculate the requirements:

Management Network

The management network is the backbone used for the majority of SUSE OpenStack Cloud management communications. Control messages are exchanged between the Controllers, Compute hosts, and cinder backends through this network. In addition to the control flows, the management network is also used to transport swift and iSCSI based cinder block storage traffic between servers.

When provisioning the IP Range, allocate sufficient IP addresses to cover both the current number of servers and any planned expansion. Use the following table to help calculate the requirements:

IPMI Network

The IPMI network is used to connect the IPMI interfaces on the servers that are assigned for use with implementing the cloud. This network is used by Cobbler to control the state of the servers during baremetal deployments.

External API Network

The External network is used to connect OpenStack endpoints to an external public network such as a company’s intranet or the public internet in the case of a public cloud provider.

When provisioning the IP Range, allocate sufficient IP addresses to cover both the current number of servers and any planned expansion. Use the following table to help calculate the requirements.

External VM Network

The External VM network is used to connect cloud instances to an external public network such as a company’s intranet or the public internet in the case of a public cloud provider. The external network has a predefined range of Floating IPs which are assigned to individual instances to enable communications to and from the instance to the assigned corporate intranet/internet. There should be a route between the External VM and External API networks so that instances provisioned in the cloud, may access the Cloud API endpoints, using the instance floating IPs.

This server contains the SUSE OpenStack Cloud installer, which is based on Git, Ansible, and Cobbler.

Log on to each type of physical server you have and issue platform-appropriate commands to identify the bus-address and port-num values that may be required. For example, run the following command:

sudo lspci -D | grep -i net

and enter this information in the space below. Use this information for the bus-address value in your nic_mappings.yml file.

To find the port-num use:

cat /sys/class/net/<device name>/dev_port

where the 'device-name' is the name of the device currently mapped to this address, not necessarily the name of the device to be mapped. Enter the information for your system in the space below.

The Control Plane consists of at least three servers in a highly available cluster that host the core SUSE OpenStack Cloud services including nova, keystone, glance, cinder, heat, neutron, swift, ceilometer, and horizon. Additional services include mariadb, ip-cluster, apache2, rabbitmq, memcached, zookeeper, kafka, storm, monasca, logging, and cmc.

Note

To mitigate the “split-brain” situation described in Section 18.4, “Network Service Troubleshooting” it is recommended that you have HA network configuration with Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation (MLAG) and NIC bonding configured for all the controllers to deliver system-level redundancy as well network-level resiliency. Also reducing the ARP timeout on the TOR switches will help.

One or more KVM Compute servers will be used as the compute host targets for instances.

Table to record your Compute host details:

Three or more servers with local disk volumes to provide cinder block storage resources.

Note

The cluster created from block storage nodes must allow for quorum. In other words, the node count of the cluster must be 3, 5, 7, or another odd number.

Table to record your block storage host details:

This section is for any additional information that you deem necessary.